Channels, Fall 2020

Channels • 20 20 • Volume 5 • Number 1 Page 61 relationship that had begun to form with Khrushchev. It was an unfortunate event on which to end Eisenhower’s term. Domestically, during his presidential years, Eisenhower oversaw some rather turbulent crises within the U.S. borders. It was around this time that the Civil Rights movement began to gain momentum, and Eisenhower’s support played a significant role in the advances made in the 1950s. There were several steps he took to expand this effort, including finishing the racial desegregation of the armed forces that Truman began and introducing the first significant civil rights legislation since the late 1800s with the signing of the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960. Eisenhower is also the president under whom the Brown v. Board of Education ruling was decided, and he was the one to act decisively by deploying the 101st Airborne Division to Little Rock High School in Arkansas to enforce the desegregation of the public school there. In many ways, the Little Rock High School situation serves as a case study in demonstrating Eisenhower’s political acumen. In terms of the broad Civil Rights movement, Eisenhower felt it was “not his job to crusade [ fervently] for integration, [yet] he also felt that he should do a conscientious job of promoting integration within areas where the President had special legal responsibility.” 77 Thus, he desegregated the armed forces, Veterans Administration Hospitals, military schools, naval bases, and the D.C. government. He held firmly to the position that federal decisions, such as the Supreme Court’s holding in Brown v. Board of Education, must be executed, but he also understood the dilemma of changing the long-seated racism and centuries-old mentality of the South. Eisenhower realized that “you cannot change people’s hearts merely by laws,” but he also knew that legal implementation of integration would be necessary on some level. 78 At the time that the situation at Little Rock High School was starting to develop, Eisenhower left for a scheduled vacation in New England. By the time his plane touched down in Newport on September 4, 1957, the “events in Little Rock had become a national crisis.” 79 What transpired over the span of the next twenty days would prove to be one of the worst domestic challenges the Eisenhower administration would have to deal with. The main problem centered on the actions of Orval Faubus, Arkansas’ governor. Faubus had chosen to oppose a federal court decision that ordered Little Rock to move forward with the desegregation of the schools, and did so with force, deploying the Arkansas National Guard to the high school. To summarize the situation, “a state governor, backed by an armed militia, now stood in defiance of a federal court order.” 80 Eisenhower now had to find a way to try to avoid direct confrontation with Faubus, but also enforce the power of the federal government. 77 Arthur Larson, Eisenhower: The President Nobody Knew (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1968), 128. 78 William I. Hitchcock, The Age of Eisenhower: American and the World in the 1950s (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018), 361. 79 Ibid, 363. 80 Ibid, 362.